NEW PARADIGM TOOL COMPANY
work by Peter Dellert
New Paradigm Tool Company
Work by Peter Dellert
September 8 - October 2, 2021
Artist Reception: Friday, September 10: 5-8 pm
Peter Dellert is a sculptor and mixed media artist living and working in Holyoke MA. Historically a furniture maker and cabinetmaker, he has been exhibiting his sculptures in galleries, museums and outdoor sculpture shows in the U.S. and Japan since 2005. He creates sculptures using diverse materials including wood, steel, concrete, grape vines, recycled automotive catalytic converter covers, Tyvek, recycled plastic and others.
His most recent works comprise an ongoing collection entitled New Paradigm Tool Company. These works utilize legacy tools for manual labor. These tools are refitted with new, surprising, and elaborate wood handles, often laboriously laminated and bent into curves; additional modifications to the tools are also employed. These changes render the tools seemingly non-functional, absurd and surrealistic.
The work focuses on an examination of hand tools. The work seeks to address the place of the worker, especially the hand worker and manual laborer in contemporary Western culture. The relation of labor and capital is embodied in the technology of tools. Tools are the means of production in society, and such means of production create our social relationships. These modified tools ask what kind of social relations would emerge from such absurd means of production? This absurdity is a critique on the un-reflected deployment of technology without the consideration of the resulting change in social relations. What at first might appear as a nostalgic look at a past era is in fact a bold statement on the future of labor in the age of digital transformation born of artificial intelligence and increasing automation of manual work in our future.
https://peterdellert.com/
